An article on playfuls.com speculates how much money Blizzard has left over at the end of the year, based on its recently announced subscription base of 10 million players.
First off, 10 million monthly subscribers at around $15 a pop means $150 million a month income for Blizz, that’s just under $1.8 billion a year. The article’s author estimates that server costs and maintenance comes to around $100 million a year, customer service and content creation probably cost around $20 million a year, so that leaves Blizz with roughly $1.68 billion a year.
Now obviously there are taxes to be taken into account, but still, that’s a whacking profit. From a personal point of view, I find it reassuring to know that the company who run the game I invest so much time and effort in, are financially comfortable, and are very unlikely to pull the plug any time soon. It also means that there will probably be a lot on money spent on WoW and future games by Blizzard, which is certainly good news for gaming fans, whichever way you look at it.
More than half of those subscribers are from asia and from what I understand they pay much less than $15 per month.
Many of the rest of us are smart enough to buy 6 months at a time bringing our monthly payment down to $13.
Many of the 10M are still trial accounts.
So they are not taking in $150M/month but the point still remains that they are not hurting for money.